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Walking away from facebook

January 15, 2019 By Being, Culture, Democracy, Featured, Wordpress 17 Comments

Back in December I announced my intention to take a sabbatical from Facebook and see what would happen. There were a number of factors in that decision, and I’ll share what I learned and what I’m doing now.  I had a few reasons for wanting to take a break: Facebook was a huge time waster, and earlier last year I deleted the app from my phone (it and Messenger and Instagram track your life your life and serve you ads based on what you’ve been doing). As a result, I have spent a lot less time there, although I do …

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From the feed

January 14, 2019 By Complexity, Design, Evaluation, Leadership, Learning, Power 2 Comments

Five links that caught my eye over the holiday. New Power: How it’s Changing the 21st Century and Why you need to Know A book review from Duncan Green, whose work on power, evaluation, and complexity in international development, I much admire. Seems this new book invites a shift in thinking about power from quantity to flows: Old Power works like a currency. It is held by a few. It is closed, inaccessible and leader-driven. It downloads and it captures. New Power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It uploads, and it distributes. The goal with …

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Capacity building and scaling a participatory approach

January 3, 2019 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Evaluation, Featured, First Nations, Leadership, Learning

On the Art of Hosting email list last month, there was an inquiry posted by Monica Nissén asking about scaling the Art of Hosting as a leadership practice through levels of engagement. By “Art of Hosting” Monica means the four fold practice, which is the basic framework for leadership that gives our community a coherent centre of practice, around presence, participation, hosting others, and co-creation.  Monica asked whether hoping these practices would just go viral in a networked way is enough, and I replied with the following, tracing a couple of long term projects I have been involved in that …

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Gratitude to my partners

December 31, 2018 By Uncategorized 2 Comments

Several years ago I made it a goal to work wth more collaborators than clients. I think I did it again this year. These days there is a beautiful blend between those with whom I collaborate and create projects and those whom I call friends.   I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to my partners this year, who make me way better at what I do.  Happy New Year to all. Caitlin Frost, my partner in business and life. Tenneson Wolf Bronagh Gallagher Caroline Rennie Lily Martins Helen Kuyper Avril Orloff Rowan Simonsen Amy Lenzo Phil Cass Dawn Fleming …

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From the feed

December 24, 2018 By Complexity, Emergence, Evaluation, First Nations

I’ll be away for a couple of weeks, so here is the last set of links for the year. Happy New Year. I am worried about democracy these days. Our electoral politics are ravaged by social media manipulation, an absence of policy discussion, and the influence of money.  Governance affords very little opportunity for meaningful citizen participation. Harold Jarche is worried too, and in this pots he tackles the question of how to save democracy head on. Our institutions are failing us. They were designed for the age of print, not  an electrically connected one. We need new structures and …

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